1st August 2007
We have been busy adding Multi-language capabilities to our Autogen development system. This means that we can more easily create multi-language sites for our clients that wish to address target markets in their local language, be it across borders or across ethnic groups.
We already have some customers starting to use this facility. One being a major international website which has 10 difference language versions, all accessed from the home page. Another is for a customer’s national site, being developed in English and Welsh.
This multi-language system gives the ability for the customer’s administrator to create an item in the admin area, for example a press release, and to enter content for that press release in all languages that the system will support. It will first need to be created in the default language that has been set within the system (for most of our customers this is English). Once the news item is created in English, the administrator can then enter content for each other language.
When viewed, the site will initially be presented in the default language but a control will be available for the user to select the language they want to view the site in. By clicking a different language, the site will re-load using that language. For example, in the “English” site you will see the press releases with the English content, but if you choose the “French” site, the news item will show with the French content. So for all content items, including forms, page titles and so on, the relevant content needs to be entered for each language.
All languages can be supported, whether reading left to right, right to left, and whatever the alphabet. Of course, for languages that use non-Latin characters, the required character set will need to be installed on the user’s PC to view it.
Contact us if you would like to know more about how this works.